3. Peer Production and Sharing
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Content
Summary
It is not intuitive that thousands of volunteers could beat big companies. Yet they do.
Coase argues that corporations exist because the transaction costs of using the market are too high. Yet GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl and others use neither markets nor hierarchies.
I call this commons-based peer production. Commons (as opposed to property) because no one person controls how the resource is used, they are either open to the public or a defined group. Peer production because it is done through self-selected, decentralized individual action.
Examples: Free software, NASA Clickworkers, Wikipedia, Second Life.
Relevance and accreditation technology can ensure the results are good: Open Directory Project, Slashdot (karma).
Distribution tech too: Project Gutenberg.
Sharing tech: SETI@Home, Napster
Sources
Sources cited in the chapter
Other relevant readings
Case Studies
Supporting examples
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Could be considered micro-outsourcing, allows API access to human effort. Also see Turkwatch for an overview of recent MTurk projects
Counter-examples
Indeterminate Examples (in progress)
- Mycroft
- UCB iSchool research project, a generalization of ClickWorkers by utilizing a few seconds of web surfer's abilities to collaboratively solve large problems, without leaving the page. Currently focusing on Wikipedia image tagging and Project Gutenberg.
Key Concepts
Commons-Based Peer Production
Commons- An institutional way of structuring rights to access, use, and control. It is understood as the opposite of "property" in that property law gives one particular person the authority to decide how a resource is used.
Commons Parameters
- 1. Open to anyone or only to a defined group
- 2. Regulated or Unregulated
Peer Production
Peer Production- Production systems that depend on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized, rather than hierarchically assigned.
Decentralization- Conditions under which the actions of many users work together effectively despite the fact that they do not rely on reducing the number of people whose will or authority counts to direct the action.
Contemporary society is witnessing an emergence of more effective peer production that does not rely on the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.
The Act of Communication
- 1. The Utterance- writing an article or drawing a picture
- 2. Relevance & Accreditation- Rendering the utterance as worthwhile
- 3. Distribution- How one takes on an utterance, and distributes it to other people who find it relevant and credible
All three acts of communication can be created and governed by peer production. For example:
- Utterance: Mapping mars with NASA Clickworkers, creating articles and editing Wikipedia, expanding game narratives in MMOGs generating and a virtual world in Second Life.
- Relevance & Accreditation- Peer book reviews and tracking purchases on Amazon, the Google's PageRank Algorithm, Slashdot's peer-review system
- Distribution- User-centered book scanning and proofreading on Project Gutenberg
Sharing Processing, Storage, and Communications Platforms
Sharing computational power is similar to peer production of information in its radical decentralization and reliance on social relations and motivations. Yet it is different in that users are not sharing their innate and acquired human capabilities. Rather, they are sharing material goods that they privately own, and are producing economic, not public, goods. Distributing computational power in this way, created and maintained by large numbers of disparate users, are in fact more powerful and efficient than those built by centralized, financed corporations. Examples:
- SETI@home- Uses the power of personal computers in peoples' homes to search for extra terrestrial life.
- FightAIDS@Home- Uses the power of personal computers in peoples' homes to screen compounds for drugs that fight the AIDS virus.
- Genome@Home- Uses the power of personal computers in peoples' homes to generate useful protiens
- Peer-To-Peer software like early Napster and BitTorent user protocols that allow tens of millions of computers users around the world to cooperate in producing the most efficient and robust file storage and retrieval system in the world.
- Skype uses FastTrack-like architecture to share their computing and communications resources to create a global telephone system running on top of the Internet.